Avast causes system hang when right-clicking desktop icon

[cmesenbring]

My system hangs when I right-click a desktop icon while Avast is running.
When I turn off Avast on-access protection, I can right-click a desktop icon and receive the pop-up menu as expected.
I found a work around by:
1. Open Windows Explorer
2. Right-click any folder or file in the Explorer window.
3. Windows Explorer hangs.
4. Press ctrl+alt+delete
5. Open the Task Manager
6. Select the Explorer application and press the End Task button.
7. Now I can right-click either a desk top icon or a file or folder in Windows Explorer and receive the pop-up menu as expected.

Does any one else observe this behavior?
Does Avast have a fix for this?
Thanks for all replies.

[ardvark]

Hi...

I have observed a "slow down" of this function on FAT32 based systems but not an actual "hang" or freeze up.

Try performing a repair install of Avast and see if that helps. Go into the Control Panel and click on "Add/Remove Programs" (or "Programs and Features" in Vista Home Premium,) and then click on avast. When you get to the window that has the menu of options to the left, scroll down to "Repair." Reboot the system upon completion.

If this doesn't work and you are using the Home version, you can try reinstalling avast from scratch. First, uninstall avast using this utility...

http://www.avast.com/eng/avast-uninstall-utility.html

Then reinstall avast from scratch from here...

http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html

If you have deleted the e-mail that contained your key, you can reregister here...

http://www.avast.com/eng/home-registration.php

Hope this helps.

May God Bless you!

[Lisandro]

Which is your Windows?
Do you have (or had in the past) any other antivirus in this computer?

[BrakTalk]

I can confirm this behavior in Vista Business (32-bit). 

With Avast protection enabled (via systray menu), right clicking on icons or files in Explorer results in Explorer becoming non-responsive (cursor busy state).  After killing Explorer.exe and reloading, right-clicking on files does not result in the negative behavior.

With Avast protection disabled, right-clicking on icons behaves as normal.  I suspect there might be something going on with the shell extension.

[Lisandro]

For sure a lot of users are using Vista Business 32bits as us and do not have problems with the Windows Explorer or shell extensions.
Did you have any other antivirus before avast in this machine? How did you remove it?

[igor]

When Explorer is frozen again, please try to create a dump instead of killing it - as described e.g. here (the process now would be explorer.exe instead of avastss, of course), and upload it to ftp://ftp.avast.com/incoming
Thanks.

[knotmyline]

When Explorer is frozen, I can not do anything except invoke task manager.  So I am at a loss to understand how to create a dump while the system is frozen.  Is there a special trick, or technique that will allow me to follow your instructions for this?

[armkbdotcom]

I have the same, here goes some more details:

1. I'm using Windows XP SP2 with latest updates
2. avast! 4.8.1335
3. The problem clearly reproducible by this scenario:
    a. starting up windows
    b. with only Standard Shield _ON_ (others initially terminated), open windows explorer and right click on any relatively large folder.
    c. reproduced - explorer.exe hung, the only way is to call task man, terminate explorer process and then start it over. After that right click on folder works just fine, no freezing.
    d. if Standard Shield is initially disabled after system reboot, then the problem is not occurring - right click on folder is NOT freezing.
    e. if Standard Shield is initially disabled after system reboot, but then after a while you enable it and right click on folder, then again the problem occurs
    f. if explorer is in freezing state, terminating avast Standard Shield from GUI doesn't bring explorer back to live.

The freezing also impact overall system performance even on my Q9400 quad core.
Conclusion - certainly this is critical bug, which requires close attention of developers, if still haven't found. The only workaround at the moment every time system boots up to restart explorer.exe which is not bad.

Let me know if I can do anything to help trace this.
with hangrep tool I'm not sure which process to dump - is it helpful to see explorer.exe dump?

[Lisandro]

with hangrep tool I'm not sure which process to dump - is it helpful to see explorer.exe dump?

Maybe ashServ.exe but I'm not sure.
Any other security program in this computer that could interfere with avast?

[armkbdotcom]

No sir. Not even any firewall software.

Small update:
- If I right click on the drives in explorer, like on C: or D:, it won't freeze.
- The freezing is only occurs on folders and no matter how many files contains that folder, it freezes even on tiny folders with couple file.

Let me know what I can do to assist in tracking down this issue.

Cheers

[Lisandro]

Check the folder <avast>\data\log
Are there any files called unpXXXX (where XXXX is a random number) or *.mdmp there?
If so, send them to vlk (at) avast.com
They may contain more information about the problem (maybe a link to this thread).

[knotmyline]

I sent the file unp126435906.tmp.mdmp

[Vlk]

The unp126435906.tmp.mdmp was actually a zero-size file (empty file) so it was of no use.
Anyway, it would be helpful to see a dump of the explorer.exe process instead (while the problem is simulated).

Also, does explorer.exe have nonzero CPU usage while the problem is simulated?

Thanks
Vlk

[armkbdotcom]

Sorry for delay.

The CPU usage of explorer.exe is 0 as far as I observed.
Trying to get explorer dump from hangrep froze hangrep (during that time the whole system, including task man was extremely slow to respond, although overall CPU usage was around 1-3%) until I manually terminated explorer.exe from taskman then hangrep immediately produced 0 size dump file.

Cheers

[igor]

Was there any disk activity when you started hangrep on the explorer process?
Maybe Explorer.exe has a lot of swapped-out memory, and the system was paging it in; it may take some time.